About the artist

The Black Dog is a British electronic music group, founded by Ken Downie along with Ed Handley and Andy Turner. The group are considered pioneers who, along with acts like Autechre, Aphex Twin, µ-ziq and LFO, came to define the UK techno movement in the early 1990s.

Albums

Liber Dogma is the tenth full-length studio album by The Black Dog released in 2011 on CD and vinyl. It was written and produced by Ken Downie, Martin and Richard Dust.The album "represents a radical shift toward dry minimalism, where the beat is pushed to the fore, served by pulsating bass lines and only a sprinkle of additional sounds for each piece. Closer by nature to Berlin’s minimal and hypnotic techno than to Detroit’s more luxurious sound, Liber Dogma has been devised with one aim and one aim only: the dance floor."The title of the final track is in Japanese, read as "Kā Kurasshu Majutsu" and meaning loosely "car-crash sorcery".

Music for Real Airports is the ninth full-length studio album by The Black Dog released in 2010 on CD, vinyl and as flac file download. It was written and produced by Ken Downie, Martin and Richard Dust. The album's title and concept of sound reference the 1978 ambient release Music for Airports, created by Brian Eno. Despite the similarities, the band mentions in a press release: "Airports have some of the glossiest surfaces in modern culture, but the fear underneath remains. Hence this record is not a utilitarian accompaniment to airports, in the sense of reinforcing the false utopia and fake idealism of air travel. Unlike Eno's Music for Airports, this is not a record to be used by airport authorities to lull their customers. ... While on tour, the Black Dog made 200 hours of field recordings, much of which was processed and combined with new music in the airport itself, waiting for the next flight. This vast amount of content has been slowly distilled into a set of particularly evocative pieces of music."The album was a collaborative project for art galleries soundtracked by The Black Dog, with visual media created by design studio Human.

Further Vexations is the eighth full-length studio album by The Black Dog released in 2009 on CD and vinyl. It was written and produced by Ken Downie, Martin and Richard Dust.There is a political dimension to the album, which is revealed through some of the track titles. "'Biomantric L-if-e' and 'You’re Only SQL' hint at the powerful information databases being used by governments in the name of security, while 'CCTV Nation' spells out unequivocally how Britain especially has become a nation under constant surveillance. To complete the picture, the cover shows part of a fingerprint on a backdrop of video surveillance images and electronic voices can be heard listing, amongst other things, ID cards, biometric measures and computer world at the end of 'Northern Electronic Soul'.

Radio Scarecrow is the seventh full-length studio album by The Black Dog released in 2008 on CD and vinyl. It was written and produced by Ken Downie, Martin and Richard Dust.The album's subject was inspired by Numbers Stations and Electronic voice phenomena as explained by Martin Dust: "It’s the fact that people will cling to anything as a belief system that interest me a lot. The album name comes from the kids in the village where I live. There’s a local guy who’s had some kind of breakdown and he walks around with a radio to his ear all the time, they call him Radio Scarecrow."

Unsavoury Products is the fifth full-length studio album by The Black Dog featuring Parisian spoken word artist Black Sifichi. The album was released in 2002 on CD.It is meant as a tribute to William S. Burroughs and inspired by The Black Dog’s collaboration with Burroughs before his death. Ken Downie explained: "We’d sent tapes to William Burroughs, and were waiting for him to deliver some spoken word back to us, but he fell ill, and died. Mr Sifichi sent us a pair of blue underpants he'd found in Paris, so he was the natural person to help us finish off the album. We got on very well, and had a lot of fun making it."Black Sifichi remembers: "The Black Dog heard my first album with Negative Stencil 'Tick' and I made contact when I heard about their Burroughs project. I thought I could do a 'cameo' reading of one of Bill's texts somewhere on it. Anyway, The Black Dog loved my voice, how it was delivered. After Bill's death a demo of mine inspired them to produce a homage to Burroughs with me. Unsavoury Products has a message... the majority of traditional electronic albums do not. It is a way to use musical aesthetics and seamlessly merge them with words.

Spanners is a studio album by The Black Dog, which then consisted of Ken Downie, Ed Handley, and Andy Turner. It was released via Warp Records on 16 January 1995. It peaked at number 30 on the UK Albums Chart.

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